Rapidly growing shadow education not only brings the socio-economic problems of increasing students' schoolwork and families' burden, but also exacerbates the problem of educational inequality due to spatial differentiation. This study takes shadow education institutions in the main city of Xi'an as the research object, constructs the shadow education field with the help of Bourdieu's field theory, and applies GIS spatial analysis technology to quantitatively understand the multi-dimensional and multi-scale differentiation characteristics of the shadow education field and its influencing factors. The results show that: 1. the intensity of shadow education field in the main city of Xi'an presents the characteristics of core area - core edge area - periphery of the circled field differentiation on the urban scale, i.e., around the ancient city of Xi'an and the second ring road to form a high intensity of the core area between the second ring road and the second ring road for the edge of the core area, and then outward to the shadow education in decreasing trend. 2.The clustering characteristics of different types of shadow education sub-fields differ significantly. The type structure varies and is dominated by the multi-centre agglomeration structure, with significant differences in the spatial agglomeration patterns of different types of shadow education. 3.Because of the different types of shadow education institutions, their market positioning and location requirements are different, and thus the choice of their spatial layout has significant differences. From the results of the influencing factors, habitus, economic capital and cultural capital are the main factors influencing the spatial agglomeration layout of shadow education institutions, while factors such as social capital have a weaker influence on them. 4.The role of various influencing factors varies according to the types of shadow educational institutions.